Grading the stunning Michael Malone hire for North Carolina basketball

The North Carolina basketball job was the highest-profile position that came open during this college basketball coaching cycle, and now it has been filled by an unlikely name. After striking out on Arizona’s Tommy Lloyd and Michigan’s Dusty May, North Carolina settled on longtime NBA head coach Michael Malone as its next head coach.

Malone has never been a college head coach and hasn’t even been an assistant in the college ranks since 2001, when he was at Manhattan. As a result, there will be questions about his transition back to the college game after more than two decades as an NBA coach. Malone spent this season as an ESPN NBA analyst after being fired by the Denver Nuggets during the 2024-25 season.

There are a lot of things that Malone will have to get used to as a college coach, most notably recruiting and dealing with players much younger than the ones he coached in the NBA. However, he has strong credentials as a basketball coach in terms of X’s and O’s and the identity that his teams have played with.

The results are hard to argue with. Malone has a 510-394 record as an NBA coach, most of which were with the Denver Nuggets. Malone led Denver to seven consecutive playoff appearances, even if he didn’t get to coach in the last of those seven, and won the franchise’s first NBA Championship back in 2023.

But was this the right way for North Carolina to go? Let’s get into what Malone does well and whether this was the right move at a critical time in Chapel Hill.

Malone’s strengths

Malone’s biggest strength is the identity that he establishes on his teams. Michael Malone teams are tough, gritty, physical, and defensively sound. Look at the Nuggets, who at least hung around average to above-average defensively despite having no rim protector in a wide open NBA. This season without Malone, Denver’s defense has suffered, and the team’s chances of winning a title have suffered with it.

Having a team that will play with intensity and physicality each and every night is a huge advantage in college basketball where that is hard to do throughout an entire regular season. But if Malone can establish that culture at UNC, his teams will always be a tough out no matter what the roster looks like.

Malone’s Nuggets teams were also excellent at the end of games in clutch situations. Now, Nikola Jokic isn’t going to be suiting up in Carolina Blue next season, but having a coach who knows how to manage and navigate the end of those games will be a big advantage for North Carolina in a college basketball landscape that doesn’t have a lot of that. It’s also worth noting that Denver has been awful in clutch games in its first season without Malone.

From a recruiting standpoint, it’s hard to know what to expect from Malone. However, he is a good role model and his players have seemed to like him throughout his NBA career, so it’s hard to label it a big problem.

One weakness that could hold him back

There is one major thing that Malone will have to adapt when he moves to the college level. At times in the NBA, he has been very stubborn with young players who are learning on the job in a way, often choosing to play older, veteran players with less potential over them.

This was a big sticking point in the feud between he and former Nuggets general manager Calvin Booth. Malone wanted to play more veterans off the bench, while Booth wanted a little bit more runway for Denver’s young players that it had picked in the draft.

While there will be a time and a place for benchings and such things during Malone’s time at North Carolina, he’s going to have to backpedal off of this tendency a little bit. The Tar Heels are sure to get a good batch of veterans in the transfer portal year in and year out, which Malone will likely lean heavily on. However, one of the biggest brands in college basketball will always be a top landing spot for some of the best high school recruits in the nation each year.

Not every freshman is going to be what Caleb Wilson was for the Tar Heels in 2024-25, either. Wilson was an anomaly, a superstar player from the second he stepped in the gym. When Malone has a talented freshman who is learning the ropes of the college game, going through a slump, will he bench him or coach him up and let him play through it? For this program to reach its potential under his leadership, it will have to be the latter.

Overall

This was a shocking hire when the news dropped on Monday, and it may come across as a bit of an underwhelming one when you consider what the hot boards looked like a few weeks ago. However, a lot of those names were tossed off circumstantially.

Dusty May and Tommy Lloyd withdrew from consideration when they led their teams to the Final Four. The timing wasn’t going to work out for Billy Donovan given the timeline of his season with the Chicago Bulls ending. Even some of the smaller names, like Mark Byington of Vanderbilt, Ben McCollum of Iowa and TJ Otzelberger of Iowa State, also never seemed to be seriously involved.

When you eliminate all of those top college basketball names, Malone is a quality hire. North Carolina is clearly sold on his ability to recruit, and his results over the last 10 years speak for themselves in terms of what he can do as a basketball coach. This is a solid hire that should have North Carolina near the top of the ACC again very soon.

Grade: A-

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